A thoroughly modern woman, Sarah Cain has long disdained her sister's Plain lifestyle. But when news comes of her sister's death, Sarah is stunned to learn she has been named guardian of her children. How can Sarah sacrifice her successful career and a life she enjoys to raise five Amish orphans she barely knows? Besides, Sarah is harboring a secret grief of her own...Will the sorrow that divides them ultimately unite the new family?

Fifteen-year-old Colie, a former fat girl, spends the summer working as a waitress in a beachside restaurant, staying with her overweight and eccentric Aunt Mira, and trying to explore her sense of self.

A young girl's Aunt Sue comes to visit her and takes her on a series of unusual adventures, from a store where they try stilts, to a lake where they have a picnic with a frog, to a zoo where the ducks wear raincoats and the monkeys are in suits.

Nine-year-old Dennis, whose uncle and father died within a year of one another, is visited by the ghost of his uncle, and together they settle some unfinished business.

Twelve-year-old Katie, living with her father, aunt, and five siblings in a small town in the 1870's, constantly makes and breaks resolutions to be a kind and generous person like her invalid Cousin Helen, but when she herself is bedridden after an accident, Katie finds her cousin's example very hard to follow.

"When he realizes that his grandfather's stories of an enchanted circus are true, Micah Tuttle sets out to find the mysterious Circus Mirandus--and to use its magic to save his grandfather's life"--

Thirteen-year-old Amy is spending a miserable two weeks on a tiny Irish island with feuding relatives when she and her seventeen-year-old Aunt Clover, with whom she writes an advice column, get sent to Miami, Florida.

After the death of the beloved aunt who has raised her, twelve-year-old Summer and her uncle Ob leave their West Virginia trailer in search of the strength to go on living.

In 1880, Noah's aunt teaches him how to read as they explore the Colorado prairie together, as Noah pushes Aunt Dora in her wheelchair.

Seventeen-year-old Ginny Blackstone precipitously travels from her home in New Jersey to London when she receives a message from an unknown man telling her he has the letters that were stolen just before she completed a series of mysterious tasks assigned by her now dead aunt, an artist.